Here is a passage borrowed from the last book written by Andrzej Szczypiorski, Jeu avec le feu (Playing with Fire), whose translation from the Polish was published in 2000 by Liana Levi. It is the monologue of a Jew who tries to reflect, before a Pole, on the religious sources of antisemitism. Let us make clear that Szczypiorski, who died in 2000, was himself a goy very attentive to Judeo-Polish relations (and the author, some time ago, of La jolie Madame Seidenman (The Beautiful Mrs. Seidenman)).
The others believed in idols of stone, in maternal heifers, in gold, in human figures with the head of a fox or in foxes with the head of a man. Only the Jews, since the Jewish world has existed, believed in one single God. With the Jews He had discussions, dealings, matters to settle, whereas the other men He barely tolerated. There is no room for doubt: He had chosen the Jews, they suited Him particularly, it was with them that He concluded the Covenant, leaving the others in solitude and abandonment, orphaned and fearful.
Could these others accept it? Was it acceptable? What is more (I tell you this with sorrow but with a deep conviction), the Jews have always behaved in a haughty and wounding manner, because they knew themselves to be chosen. Imagine for yourself the Jewish state of mind two thousand years ago, or five hundred years ago, or again today. Our whole universe, at bottom, is Jewish, because God is Jewish and because the universe belongs to God, creator of all things visible and invisible. Finished. Full stop. Try now to imagine the state of mind of all the other men, condemned for millennia to endure the haughty and wounding spirit of the Jews. I mean: of any Jew whatsoever, the most wretched, the most tried by misery and humiliation, the worst of Jews under the Jewish sun. For the poorest and the most wretched of Jews is always and still a chosen one, whereas the other, even if he reigns over half the world, does not count.
From then on, how to argue? The others endured, teeth clenched; they raised temples to their gods, made them offerings, questioned them about their affairs, but those gods kept silent… The Jews stood apart, shaking their heads; their eyes were full of contempt and their faces wore a mocking smile. And there was no chance of salvation, no means of becoming a Jew. You understand perfectly that one could not become a Jew, one had to be one. One had first to receive this mark of infamy, the curse of Jewishness, and thus a particular complaisance of God, and then came all the rest, all that baggage of whispers, of fears, of obsessions. I would say that it is a kind of usurpation on the part of God, who created the universe for the Jews so that they might dwell in it, and who at the same time gave them suffering, frightful strangeness, and the dread of this election — for God still and always regards all the others as bastards; from then on they, in order to be able to bear it, are bound to persecute every Jew who falls into their hands.
I even believe that there was a moment when God wanted to make corrections, for He was deeply disappointed by the world. Each of us knows that weariness, which makes one seek new solutions, another chance of success for what one had planned. I can therefore imagine that God too had an instant of hesitation and doubt, and that He had concluded the necessity of correcting something, of relieving the Jews in their destiny as the chosen, as the only just ones — otherwise one might fear that they could not bear their burden. Perhaps God thought this, that He doubted the spiritual strength of the Jews and that He feared that His whole enterprise of the creation of that world would go bankrupt, for the Jews would have had enough, they would leave the good path, they would descend among the other peoples. They had already attempted it, more than once moreover: you must remember the story of the golden calf in the desert, and other dark doubts that had tormented many Jews, not to forget Moses himself. I believe that God then had a hesitation, the proof of which is the coming of Christ, long predicted and who finally arrived with an announcement, with a marvelous, joyful, and relieving news — each Greek, each Scythian, each Moor could also be saved.
I think, however, that this reasonable idea came to God too late, which is why His project was not convincing. This Great Coming in no way improved the destiny of the Jews — rather the contrary; for, from that moment on, the others accused the Jews of deicide, something no one had invented before, not even the cruelest of the Assyrians or the Egyptians. I can tell you, I feel all this as an unpardonable fault of God’s. To tell the truth, I no longer know what to think of it myself.
Perhaps the world was conceived thus, as an abyss of suffering. A well of pain. A cavern of sin and of blood. Can one explain otherwise all that dwells in our memories?
I must be exaggerating, for, in our memory, practically nothing remains. It is terrible, and it is unjust. But sometimes I have the impression, and dreams too, that it is precisely through universal forgetting that the world strives to save itself. By this means, the world gives a meaning to its perpetuity. I then wake in tears. How is it possible? Did God want it so? Can nothing remain of this suffering, save the annihilation of annihilation, the death of death? This is unbearable to me; I relive a second annihilation, its repetition all the more dreadful because I know its ineluctable end, and all that must come thereafter — and so there is no longer in me the slightest spark of the hope kept, in those times, by the man disembarking onto the ramp of the camp, or by the one being pushed toward the nearest wall.
But on the other side, on the side of life, so to speak, it cannot be otherwise. If men persisted in remembering, what is happening around us would not be possible. He who remembers can no longer compose music. And he cannot listen to it without a feeling of guilt. In the face of this memory, everything is remorse of conscience. You build a house and cannot sleep in it, for every house is built upon human ashes. You sell a pair of trousers… But who will wear them? They are dead, they were annihilated.
Forgetting is perhaps the only way out in the situation into which our world has put itself. To forget, to forget everything. Yet a cruel consequence follows from it. Each day, we kill the victims anew. I kill my father, my uncle, my schoolmates, my ancestors; I kill myself.
I do not know whether this solution is fitting. In truth, I do not know what to think, how to speak to God, how to continue to tolerate Him in my heart, after what He has contrived for us…